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Tony Pearson is a Master Inventor and Senior IT Architect for the IBM Storage product line at the
IBM Executive Briefing Center in Tucson Arizona, and featured contributor
to IBM's developerWorks. In 2016, Tony celebrates his 30th year anniversary with IBM Storage. He is
author of the Inside System Storage series of books. This blog is for the open exchange of ideas relating to storage and storage networking hardware, software and services.
(Short URL for this blog: ibm.co/Pearson )

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Well, it's Tuesday, and you know what that means... IBM announcements!

In today's environment, clients expect more from their storage, and from their storage provider. The announcements span the gamut, from helping to use Business Analytics to analyze Big Data for trends, insights and patterns, to managing private, public and hybrid cloud environments, all with systems that are optimized for their particular workloads.

There are over a dozen different announcements, so I will split these up into separate posts. Here is part 1.

IBM Scale Out Network Attach Storage (SONAS) R1.3

I have covered [IBM SONAS] for quite some time now. Based on IBM's General Parallel File System (GPFS), this integrated system combines servers, storage and software into a fully functional scale-out NAS solution that support NFS, CIFS, FTP/SFTP, HTTP/HTTPS, and SCP protocols. IBM continues its technical leadership in the scale-out NAS marketplace with new hardware and software features.

The hardware adds new disk options, with 900GB SAS 15K RPM drives, and 3TB NL-SAS 7200 RPM drives. These come in 4U drawers of 60 drives each, six ranks of ten drives each. So, with the high-performance SAS drives that would be about 43TB usable capacity per drawer, and with the high-capacity NL-SAS drives about 144TB usable. You can have any mix of high-performance drawers and high-capacity drawers, up to 7200 drives, for a maximum usable capacity of 17PB usable (21PB for those who prefer it raw). This makes it the largest commercial scale-out NAS in the industry. This capacity can be made into one big file system, or divided up to 256 smaller file systems.

In addition to snapshots of each file system, you can divide the file system up into smaller tree branches and snapshot these independently as well. The tree branches are called fileset containers. Furthermore, you can now make writeable clones of individual files, which provides a space-efficient way to create copies for testing, training or whatever.

Performance is improved in many areas. The interface nodes now can support a second dual-port 10GbE, and replication performance is improved by 10x.

SONAS supports access-based enumeration, which means that if there are 100 different subdirectories, but you only have authority to access five of them, then that's all you see, those five directories. You don't even know the other 95 directories exist.

I saved the coolest feature for last, it is called Active Cloud Engine™ that offers both local and global file management. Locally, Active Cloud Engine placement rules to decide what type of disk a new file should be placed on. Management rules that will move the files from one disk type to another, or even migrates the data to tape or other externally-managed storage! A high-speed scan engine can rip through 10 million files per node, to identify files that need to be moved, backed up or expired.

Globally, Active Cloud Engine makes the global namespace truly global, allowing the file system to span multiple geographic locations. Built-in intelligence moves individual files to where they are closest to the users that use them most. This includes an intelligent push-over-WAN write cache, on-demand pull-from-WAN cache for reads, and will even pre-fetch subsets of files.

No other scale-out NAS solution from any other storage vendor offers this amazing and awesome capability!

IBM® Storwize® V7000

Last year, we introduced the [IBM Storwize V7000], a midrange disk system with block-level access via FCP and iSCSI protocols. The 2U-high control enclosure held two cannister nodes, a 12-drive or 24-drive bay, and a pair of power-supply/battery UPS modules. The controller could attach up to nine expansion enclosures for more capacity, as well as virtualize other storage systems. This has been one of our most successful products ever, selling over 100PB in the past 12 months to over 2,500 delighted customers.

The 12-drive enclosure now supports both 2TB and 3TB NL-SAS drives. The 24-drive enclosures support 200/300/400GB Solid-State Drives (SSD), 146 and 300GB 15K RPM drives, 300/450/600GB 10K RPM drives, and a new 1TB NL-SAS drive option. For those who want to set up "Flash-and-Stash" in a single 2U drawer, now you can combine SSD and NL-SAS in the 24-drive enclosure! This is the perfect platform for IBM's Easy Tier sub-LUN automated tiering. IBM's Easy Tier is substantially more powerful and easier to use than EMC's FAST-VP or HDS's Dynamic Tiering.

Last week, at Oracle OpenWorld, there were various vendors hawking their DRAM/SSD-only disk systems, including my friends at Texas Memory Systems, Pure Storage, and Violin Memory Systems. When people came to the IBM booth to ask what IBM offers, I explained that both the IBM DS8000 and the Storwize V7000 can be outfitted in this manner. With the Storwize V7000, you can buy as much or little SSD as you like. You do not have to buy these drives in groups of 8 or 16 at a time.

The Storwize V7000 is the sister product of the IBM SAN Volume Controller, so you can replicate between one and the other. I see two use cases for this. First, you might have a SVC at a primary location, and decide to replicate just the subset of mission-critical production data to a remote location, and use the Storwize V7000 as the target device. Secondly, you could have three remote or branch offices (ROBO) that replicate to a centralized data center SAN Volume Controller.

Lastly, like the SVC, the Storwize V7000 now supports clustering so that you can now combine multiple control enclosures together to make a single system.

IBM® Storwize® V7000 Unified

Do you remember how IBM combined the best of SAN Volume Controller, XIV and DS8000 RAID into the Storwize V7000? Well, IBM did it again, combining the best of the Storwize V7000 with the common NAS software base developed for SONAS into the new "Storwize V7000 Unified".

You can upgrade your block-only Storwize V7000 into a file-and-block "Storwize V7000 Unified" storage system. This is a 6U-high system, consisting of a pair of 2U-high file modules connected to a standard 2U-high control enclosure. Like the block-only version, the control enclosure can attach up to nine expansion enclosures, as well as all the same support to virtualize external disk systems. The file modules combine the management node, interface node and storage node functionality that SONAS R1.3 offers.

What exactly does that mean for you? In addition to FCP and iSCSI for block-level LUNs, you can carve out file systems that support NFS, CIFS, FTP/SFTP, HTTP/HTTPS, and SCP protocols. All the same support as SONAS for anti-virus checking, access-based enumeration, integrated TSM backup and HSM functionality to migrate data to tape, NDMP backup support for other backup software, and Active Cloud Engine's local file management are all included!

IBM SAN Volume Controller V6.3

The SAN Volume Controller [SVC] increases its stretched cluster to distances up to 300km. This is 3x further than EMC's VPLEX offering. This allows identical copies of data to be kept identical in both locations, and allows for Live Partition Mobility or VMware vMotion to move workloads seamlessly from one data center to another. Combining two data centers with an SVC stretch cluster is often referred to as "Data Center Federation".

The SVC also introduces a low-bandwidth option for Global Mirror. We actually borrowed this concept from our XIV disk system. Normally, SVC's Global Mirror will consume all the bandwidth it can to keep the destination copy of the data within a few seconds of currency behind the source copy. But do you always need to be that current? Can you afford the bandwidth requirements needed to keep up with that? If you answered "No!" to either of these, then the low-bandwidth option is you. Basically, a FlashCopy is done on the source copy, this copy is then sent over to the destination, and a FlashCopy is made of that. The process is then repeated on a scheduled basis, like every four hours. This greatly reduces the amount of bandwidth required, and for many workloads, having currency in hours, rather than seconds, is good enough.

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I am very excited about all these announcements! It is a good time to be working for IBM, and look forward to sharing these exciting enhancements with clients at the Tucson EBC.

I have arrived safely to San Francisco, and was able to check-in at the hotel, pick up my registration badge for Oracle OpenWorld 2011, and attend the first keynote session. This is the largest Oracle OpenWorld event to-date, with over 45,000 attendees from 117 different countries. There are 520,000 square feet of exhibition floor, and over 2,400 educational sessions. The conference is spread across the different buildings of the Moscone center, as well as nearby hotels. On average, attendees will walk seven miles during the week.

Larry Ellison was the keynote speaker for this first kick-off session. He focused almost exclusively on server and storage hardware. He feels that business is all about moving data, not doing integer math.

Exadata

At the beginning of 2011, Oracle had only sold about 1,000 Exadata, but they have a sales target to sell an additional 3,000 Exadata boxes by year end.
The Exadata offers up to 10x columnar compression, and has 10x faster bandwidth (40Gbps Infiniband versus 4Gbps FCP). If you have a 100TB database, it would take up only 10TB of disk with this approach. He claims that the 90TB of disk you don't have to buy can then be used to buy more DRAM and/or Flash SSD.

(Realistically, since SSD is 15x more expensive than spinning disk, you can only purchase about 6TB of Flash for the 90TB you save on disk!)

Larry claims the design point for Exadata and Exalogic was to offer a system that was more powerful than IBM's fastest P795 computer, but cheaper than commodity x86 hardware. His secret is to "Parallel everything" for faster performance, and no single points of failure (SPOF). Exadata offers up to 10-50x faster query, and 4-10x faster OLTP. To keep costs low, Exadata uses all commodity hardware except the Infiniband. He cited various customer examples:

A company replaced 36 Teradata with 3 Exadata and result was application was 8x faster.

Banco Chile 9x faster than previous system

Deutsche Post 60x faster

Sogetti gets 60x faster backups.

French bank BNP Paribas 17x faster and no change to applications.

Proctor & Gamble 18x faster

Merck 5x faster

Turkcell 250TB compressed to 25TB, 10x faster

The problem was that in each example, he said what it was compared against was the old previous system, which varies and could have been an older Sun system, or an old system from HP, IBM or Dell. Perhaps it was a freudian slip, but Larry mistakenly said "Paralyze" your applications, when he probably meant to "Parallelize".

SPARC Supercluster

Of all their 380,000 Oracle customers, 70 percent have SPARC/Solaris and/or Linux. Last week, Oracle announced the new SPARC-T4, which Larry claimed was 5x faster than the previous SPARC-T3. Larry feels that for the first time ever, a non-IBM CPU can challenge the long-standing rein of the IBM POWER series processor. Larry admitted that the IBM POWER7 chip actually did some tasks faster than the SPARC-T4, so his work is not yet done, but they plan to offer a new SPARC-T5 next year that will be 2x better than the SPARC-T4.

Larry compared the I/O bandwidth of serv ers based on SPARC-T4, compared to POWER7, and found that the SPARC-T4 has double the I/O bandwidth, for a cost that was only about 1/4 the cost of a mainframe. IBM offers both. POWER7-based servers for CPU-intensive workloads, and System z (S/390)-based systems for I/O-intensive workloads. Larry feels that even though POWER7 is superior than SPARC-T4 for mathematical calculations, all business applications are focused on I/O-bandwidth to move data, not computations.

Larry claims the new SPARC-T4 can do 1.2 million IOPS. He uses 40 Gbps Infiniband instead of traditional SAN-attached FCP solutions.

Exalytics

A new "box" called Exalytics, combines their commodity hardware platform with a hueristic adaptive in-memory cache, their latest "me-too" solution that compares with what IBM already offers in [IBM SolidDB]. In fact, their me-too is not even internally developed, but rather the result of an acquisition of a company called "Times Ten". I thought it was interesting that the only piece of Oracle software mentioned during Larry's 90-minute speach, was this piece of acquired technology. The new Exalytics product run on a small rack and grow, analyzing relational data, non-relational OLAP, as well as unstructured documents. The result is what Larry called "the Speed of Light".

He also mentioned that Bob Shimp would kick-off the Cloud later in the week. Given that Larry himself thought that Cloud was a stupid, over-marketed term that nobody has deployed over the past few years, to a complete believer, claiming that over 20 live demos will be given this year on Cloud.

Perhaps the funniest quote was his motivation to use Infiniband as the interconnect

"Ethernet was invented by Xerox when I was a child."
-- Larry Ellison

Here are some sessions that IBM is featuring on Monday. Note the first two are Solution Spotlight sessions at the IBM Booth #1111 where I will be most of the time.

IBM Cloud Computing Solutions for Oracle

10/03/11, 10:30 a.m. – 11:00 a.m., Solution Spotlight, Booth #1111 Moscone South
Presenter: Chuck Calio,Technical Strategist, IBM Systems & Technology Group
IBM is recognized in the IT industry as one of the "Big 6" cloud providers, along with Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce and Yahoo. This session will highlight how IBM Cloud offerings apply to Oracle applications.

Lowering Cost and increasing efficiency in your long term support of Oracle EPM and BI

I took over a hundred pictures at this event. Here are a few of my favorites from Monday and Tuesday.

The IBM Booth #1111 Moscone South

I spent most of my time at the booth in the exhibition area. It was a huge booth, covering various software offerings in the front, and servers and storage systems in the back. Here I am next to the "IBM Watson" simulator, allowing people to play Jeopardy! game against Watson.

In the front was "EoS" which stands for "Exchanging Opinions for Solutions" -- an interactive screen developed by Somnio that allows people to enter questions and opinions and get crowd-sourced answers from people following the Twitter stream. The EoS was connected to the [IBM Mobile App] so people could follow the conversation.

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IBM Customer Appreciation Events

On Monday evening we had some customer appreciation events. First was for IBM customers of "JD Edwards", which runs on "IBM i" operating system on POWER servers. This was an elegant affair at the [Weinstein Gallery] surrounded by works of art by Pablo Picasso and Marc Chagall. One customer expressed concern that Oracle would functionally stabilize JD Edwards "World" software and force everyone to move over to "Enterprise One". I told him that I had seen the roadmap for "World" and there are three healthy releases planned for its future. He should have nothing to worry about. IBM and Oracle will work together to make sure our mutual customers get the solutions they need.

Later, we went to the "Infusion" bar for another "IBM appreciation" event with a live band. Here's a Polaroid photo taken of me in the crowd.

Titan Gala Award Reception

On Tuesday night, Oracle gave out awards in 29 categories. IBM won three this year. I took a photo with the ladies from Beach Blanket Babylon, and a mermaid! Joining me to celebrate the awards were IBMers Carolann Kohler, Boyd Fenton, Sue Haad, and Susan Adomovich.

This is my first time attending Oracle OpenWorld, so naively I asked why there were only 29 categories and not an even 30. The IBMers joked that the 30th might as well have been "Best Server/Storage Platform for Integer Math" which Larry Ellison conceded that IBM's POWER 795 server wins over Oracle's new SPARC T4 Supercluster. As Larry said during his keynote "We still have some work to do to beat IBM!"

The event was held at the San Francisco City Hall, I got to walk on the red carpet, with lavish food and drink. I was even given a hand-rolled cigar! Thank you Oracle! We are proud to be your "Diamond Partner" helping our mutual customers get the most out of our solutions.

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The "Booth Babes" Controversy

At the EMC booth, these three lovely ladies, Jennifer, Tamara and Manuela, were just a few of the dozen so-called booth babes EMC hired from a local agency. Attendees with technical questions were directed to the EMC guys in the back of the booth, behind the wall.

IBM stopped using "booth babes" a long while ago. At IBM Booth #1111, we had a healthy balance of real men and women executives, technical experts, and support staff at the IBM booth.

A guy from EMC came over to our booth later to explain that EMC is at two other events this same week, and their technical staff is spread thin. EMC is a small company, and skilled technical people are in short supply. We get it. Not every IT vendor has an army of experts in every category like IBM.

I want to thank the IBM-Oracle Alliance team, especially Nancy Spurry and Carolann Kohler for having me involved in these events.

This post concludes my series of posts on Oracle OpenWorld 2011 conference. Here are some pictures from Wednesday and Thursday.

IBM as the yardstick by which everyone measures against

Our friends at Violin Memory systems mentioned our joint-venture success results with IBM GPFS, scanning 10 billion files in less than an hour. (Their booth must have been slow, because members of their team spent a lot of time in our IBM booth!)

In fact, it seemed every company compared themselves to IBM in one fashion or another. Larry said that "IBM is a great company" and mentioned the IBM systems several times in comparisons to Oracle's newly announced hardware offerings.

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Larry's Sailing Vessel

When things slowed down, I took a walk to see the other parts of the exhibition area. In the Moscone West building was Larry's catamaran that won [last year's America's Cup].

I used to sail myself, and have been part of crews in sailing races in both Japan and Australia. A few years ago, I watched the America's Cup time trials in New Zealand.

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On the Streets of San Francisco

On the streets, IBM had advertised some of its products in a manner that thousands of attendees would see every day. Here we have some factoids related to IBM Netezza and DB2 database on POWER servers. We were very careful not to mention either product in the IBM Booth itself, as we all understand that IBM is a guest in Oracle's house this week. We certainly don't want to do anything to upset Larry in any way to make him treat IBM like he treated HP last year, or Salesforce.com this year.

Rest in Peace, Steve Jobs, 1955-2011

On Wednesday evening at Oracle OpenWorld, we were tearing down the booth when we heard that Apple co-founder Steve Jobs had passed away. This is truly a loss for the entire IT industry. I never met Steve in person, nor have I been to any Apple conferences like MacWorld that he spoke at.

At various keynote sessions, Larry Ellison compared his Oracle products to those of Apple, Inc., suggesting that Oracle is the "Apple for the Enterprise".

On our way back to the Hilton hotel on O'Farrell, there was a candle vigil at the Apple Store near Union Square. People left sticky notes on the glass window.

There were a lot of tributes to Steve Jobs, but I liked this 15-minute video of his 2005 Commencement Speech at Stanford University titled [How to Live before you Die.

This will be one of those moments where years later, many people will remember exactly where they were, and what they were doing, when they heard the news. For many, that news came as tweets or text messages on the very iPhones and iPads he helped design.

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Rock Concert - Wednesday night

On Wednesday evening, I joined thousands of other attendees on Treasure Island to hear and watch Sting, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, and the English Beat in concert. It was cold and dark, but we all had a good time. Needless to say, I didn't make it to Marc Benioff's 8:00am Thursday morning session!

A word of advice: If you go to an evening rock concert at Treasure Island, dress warmly!

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Despite the sad news about Steve Jobs, I had a great time at this conference. I learned a lot about what other IT vendors are doing, talked to dozens of IBM clients at the booth, and got to make some new friends that work in other parts of IBM.

(FTC Disclosure: I work for IBM. IBM and Apple are technology partners. I proudly own an Apple iPod, several Mac Mini computers and shares of stock in both IBM and Apple, Inc.)

Wednesday afternoon at the [Oracle OpenWorld 2011] conference started with another keynote session.
In a last minute substitution, Oracle OpenWorld rescheduled Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff's keynote from Wednesday to a Thursday 8:00am morning general session, to make room for S. D. Shibulal, CEO of InfoSys Consulting.

(Forbes Magazine considers InfoSys the #15 [most innovative company]. To give this some context, Salesforce.com and Amazon.com are #1 and #2, Google and Apple are in the top 10, and Oracle is #77.
)

S.D. started out saying that "Today is October 4, a very important day in history!" This was October 6, so everybody was a bit confused, checking their watches and tablets to confirm what day it was. What he was referring to was the first trans-pacific flight that happened October 4 exactly 80 years ago, the pilots were awarded medals and accolades for this tremendous achievement. This year, trans-pacific flights happen every day, and nobody raises an eyebrow. I looked this up, and the first trans-pacific flight happened [June 9, 1928] from California to Australia involved stops in Hawaii and Fiji, but [Clyde Edward Pangborn] is remembered for his October 4, 1931 flight as the first non-stop flight, from Japan to Seattle, Washington. His point, however, is that innovation has a lot of "firsts" that people don't realize until things are commonplace.

If you look at the 1991 list of Fortune 500 companies, only 25 percent of these still are in operation today (IBM is one of them!) The rest failed to stay relevant, to reach and scale as needed for market transitions. He gave examples of travel agencies and the Encyclopedia Brittanica that failed to adapt in the face of [disintermediation]. Success in today's marketplace requires three things:

Predicting and sensing tomorrow's demand

Influencing tomorrow's demand

Fulfilling tomorrow's demand

Ming Tsai, Managing Director and Chief Client Office of InfoSys, asked a series of questions:

"Is Market Research dead?" In 2010, over 4 EB of data were generated. Marketeers do not need to conduct surveys to generate more data, they are drowning in data that is all around them. 80 percent of profits come from 20 percent of your clients.

"Who controls the message?" This was perhaps a tip of the hat to ousted Marc Benioff of Salesforce.com for being able to organize his own last-minute keynote at the St. Regis hotel using twitter and other social media. I was not there, but apparently the place was packed with a line around the building to hear Marc talk.

"Is Product Development backwards? This is referring to the standard waterfall approach of designing a product, shipping a product, with the first interaction with the end customer being the last stage. In new "agile" development models, customers are engaged up front, with highly iterative deployments, to ensure that the final product meets customer requirements.

He showed a product called "Social Edge" from InfoSys that determines "sentiment analysis". Users can co-create their own user experience.

Paul Gottsegen, InfoSys, explained how "Mobility" is challenging existing business models. Their latest product "mConnect" offers to link web applications to any mobile device. This includes healthcare monitoring, cash for the 50 percent of the world that are "unbanked", and even Cable TV on an iPad. He brought on stage Bill Tucker, VP of IT at Nordstrom, a retail outlet of fine clothing.

(I have a collection of Nordstrom jackets that I had bought in San Francisco Union Square throughout the years. Every time that I fly from Tucson to San Francisco, especially in the summer, it is freezing cold, and I need to buy a jacket. This time I was prepared, and brought several of me jackets with me.)

Bill explained that people are not comparing their end-user experience at Nordstrom's with direct competitors like Macy's, but rather with all of their other end-user experiences like that at Starbuck's coffee, or the Apple store. This raises the bar in customer expectations. Nordstrom has been force to make drastic improvements to keep up with these expectations.

Prasad Thirkutam, InfoSys, asked if supply chains are agile and adaptive enough. He mentioned that 40 percent of Flash memory and 60 percent of circuit boards are made in Japan that were recently hit by an earthquake and tsunami. He explained product "Demand-to-Deliver" solution from InfoSys that provides multi-level inventory, identifying the safety stock levels based on various analytics. This reduces waste by 7 percent, and shortens cash from 60 days to 40 days.

Prasad introduced Vin Melvin, CIO of Arrow Electronics. His focus is to get data "correct". To increase end-to-end speed to handle order changes and cancelations, and to optimize and re-balance supply chain as needed.

(FTC Disclosure: Arrow is a distributor of IBM equipment. I have worked with Arrow many years.)

Tuesday morning at the [Oracle OpenWorld 2011] conference started with another keynote session. This time, Michael Dell, founder, chairman and CEO of Dell, Inc., presented. Over the past nine years, he feels "the line between business and IT is going away." Michael claims that "Dell is no longer a PC company", and instead is focusing on data center solutions and services to be more like IBM.

John Fowler, Executive VP for Oracle Hardware, claims that Oracle has a single team for hardware development. The SPARC-T4 is their newest chip, with 8 cores and 64 dynamic threads, running at 3.0 GHz. It has on-chip 10GbE ethernet, PCIe, DDR3 Memory controllers and Crypto features. For storage, Oracle now offers four different offerings:

Exadata (as Database storage)

ZFS Storage Array (NAS)

Pillar Axiom (block-level I/O)

StorageTek tape

Edward Screven, Chief Corporate Architect at Oracle, indicated that the new Oracle Linux kernel allows for zero downtime patches, meaning that you can update the OS while applications are running without a reboot. The OracleVM (based on open-source XEN) supports both x86 and SPARC-based server hosts. On x86, it can run Linux, Solaris and Windows guests. On SPARC, it can run Linux and Solaris guests.

John Loaiza, Oracle Senior VP, explained the Exadata. It has 168 disk drives and 56 PCIe Flash Cards, connected via 40Gbps Infiniband. The Exadata keeps all data on spinning disk, with "warm data" cached on Flash, and "hot data" cached on DRAM. This is similar to IBM's Easy Tier feature on the DS8000, SVC and Storwize V7000.

Brad Cameron, Senior Director, explained Exalogic, which pre-dates Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems. The idea was to build an x86 machine for running Java applications on Oracle WebLogic. The Exalogic can connect via Infiniband to an Exadata to access database information, and to 10GbE ethernet for the rest of the servers and clients. Whether you get the quarter, half or full-rack system, you get 40TB of NAS storage.

Ganesh Ramamurthy, Oracle VP of Hardware Engineering, presented the SPARC Supercluster. This combines the storage cells from Exadata, the compute nodes from Exalogic, shared NAS storage using ZFS file system, and Solaris 11 with OracleVM. Taking a cue from IBM's zEnterprise Unified Resource Manager, Oracle is offering centralized management for all the layers in their SPARC Supercluster stack. The SPARC Supercluster is intended as general purpose machine, and can be used to run non-Oracle applications like SAP. From a storage perspective, he claims that the storage in the SPARC Supercluster is 2.5x better than EMC VMAX, which basically puts it comparable to IBM XIV pricing.

For my readers in San Francisco attending Oracle OpenWorld, here are some sessions that IBM is featuring on Wednesday. Note the first two are Solution Spotlight sessions at the IBM Booth #1111 where I will be most of the time.

In the Heat of the Oracle Fusion Decision-Making Process: What's Your Next Move?

10/05/11, 10:00 a.m. -- 11:00 a.m., OpenWorld session #9423
Presenter: Esther Parker, IBM
This session discusses how companies can embrace Oracle Fusion so they can meet their business objectives today and in the future.

Monday morning of the [Oracle OpenWorld 2011] conference had Joe Tucci, CEO of EMC, present the keynote. Joe indicated that I.T. stands for "Industry in Transition". He had a chart that showed the history of IT, from the mainframe and mini-computer, to the PC and client/server era, and now to the Cloud era. He called these "waves of disruption". The catalysts for change are a "Budge Dilemma", "Information Deluge" and "Cyber Security". The keynote was very similar to what EMC presented at [VMworld] conference earlier this summer.

"We have failed our customers. Over the past 10 years, they spend 73% to maintain their existing systems, and only 27% for new."
--- Joe Tucci, EMC

While many people equate "EMC" and "Failure", I believe Joe was referring not just to his own company, but most of the other IT vendors as well. Analysts predict that from January 1, 2010 to December 31, 2019, the world of stored data will grow from 0.9 ZB to 35.2 ZB, which represents a 44x increase. During that same time, IT staff is only expected to grow 50 percent. A staggering 90 percent of this data will be unstructured (non-database) content. Meanwhile, the average company gets cyber-attacked 300 times per week.

The answer is Cloud Computing. A few years ago, EMC was trying to get people to go "private cloud" route instead of "public cloud", they now have a more realistic "hybrid cloud" approach similar to IBM. Of the clients that EMC works with, 35 percent are implementing some form of cloud, and another 30 percent are planning to. The tenents of Hybrid Cloud are "Efficiency", "Control" and "Choice" which equals "Agility".

Joe also mentioned that there is now a new "layering" for IT. Instead of storage, switches and servers, we have a cloud platform of shared resources, mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, and management.

Joe feels there is a massive opportunity where Cloud meets Big Data. A cute video showed a driver wearing a motorcycle helmet so you can't see his face get into an under-powered car with "VNXe" on the license plate. He punches in "Cloud and Big Data" into the GPS navigation system, and starts out on city streets. Then the car transforms to an under-utilized family sedan "VNX" on a highway in the middle of the desert, then transforms to an over-priced sports car labeled "VMAX" as it climbs into the mountains surrounded by fog. The video borrowed the "CARS" theme from the videos IBM developed for its 2008 launch of "Information Infrastructure" initiative.

EMC's Pat Gelsinger (CTO) and fellow blogger Chad Sakac did some demos of VMware vCenter. They called the VMware vSphere "the Datacenter-wide OS" indicating that EMC storage has 75 points of integration with their "partner" (VMware is majority-owned by EMC, so I am not sure if partner is the right term). If you don't count Itanium, SPARC, POWER and IBM Syste z architectures, VMware enjoys over 80 percent marketshare for server virtualization.

(Full disclosure: IBM is the leading reseller of VMware.)

Pat claims that 40 percent of Oracle Apps at EMC run VMware. For the longest time, Oracle refused support its apps on VMware, but they relaxed this restrictive policy back in 2009. Today, nearly 25 percent of Oracle Apps run virtualized. EMC claims that they can support 5 million VMs on a single VMAX, and can generate 1 million IOPS from a single VMware ESX host.

Chad did a demo of vFabric which allows a vCenter plug-in to kick up Database instances of OracleDB, MySQL, Hadoop, PostgreSQL, and GreenPlum (GreenPlum is EMC's version of open-source PostgreSQL).

Chad showed that VMware vMition could move workloads from servers without solid-state, to servers that are flash-enabled. Lightweight workloads can be moved from DAS-enabled servers to compute-enabled storage devices like their EMC Isilon. (EMC acquired Isilon to offer their me-too version of IBM's Scale-Out NAS [SONAS] product.) EMC announced their first "Solid-State on a PCIe card" from their Project Lightning initiative. These are 320 GB capacity, so they sounded like a me-too versino of IBM's [Fusion-io IOdrive] cards that IBM has had available for quite some time now.

Next, Pat and Chad talked about Big Data. The world is transforming from a manual scale-up model to an automated scale-out architecture. Moving from "islands" to "pools". They used a cute example of Car Insurance. Business Analytics were able to review a safe drivers record, including the driver's Facebook and Twitter activity, and give him a discount, and then review the bad driving habits of another driver, and raise the bad driver's rates.

EMC announced their "GreenPlum Analytics Platform" (GAP?). I often tell people that if you want to predict what EMC will announce next, just look at what IBM announced 18 months ago. This new platform sounds like their me-too version of IBM's [Smart Analytics System].

After EMC, Judith Sim from Oracle introduced the Ed Lee, the Mayor of San Francisco which was just named the "Greenest city in North America". He thanked the audience for contributing an estimated $100 million USD to his local economy. Also, he was happy that by eliminating paper-based handouts and conference materials, the audience saved 1,636 trees.

Mark Hurd, formerly CEO of HP, and now president of Oracle, gave some highlights of 2011, and what Oracle's strategy is going forward. He said that Oracle plans to provide complete stacks, complete choice, and have each component of the stack be best-of-breed. In 2011, Oracle introduced the new MySQL 5.5 database, Java 7 programming language, and the Solaris 11 operating system with ZFS file system. Oracle spent $4 Billion in R&D, and gained 20 percent growth in software licenses, which gave them 33 percent growth fiscally for 2011 year. Oracle acquired Larry Ellison's [Pillar Data] storage company. Oracle also launched a [Database Appliance].

Thomas Kurian, another Oracle executive, finished the keynote session. He started with yet another chart showing the historical transition from Mainframe to Tablet. He indicated that leading-edge OracleDB and their Fusion middleware combined with industry standard hardware provides 5-30x faster queries, 4-10x less disk space, and simplifies the data center footprint. Their Exadata provides what he likes to call "Hierarchical Storage Management" between DRAM, Flash Solid-State, and spinning disk.

(Note: I started my career at IBM in 1986 working on a product called DFHSM, the Data Facility Hierarchical Storage Manager! It is now a vibrant component of DFSMS, part of IBM's z/OS mainframe operating system.)

ps this new announcement is to address that deficiency.

Finally, Oracle announced their "Exadata Storage Expansion Rack". Many people realized that the Exadata was under-provisioned for storage, which explains why they have only sold a few thousand of them, so perha

If you are attending Oracle OpenWorld, here are sessions for Tuesday that IBM is featuring. Note the first two are Solution Spotlight sessions at the IBM Booth #1111 where I will be most of the time.

The last keynote session of the [Oracle OpenWorld 2011] conference was Oracle making a few major announcements.

Steve Miranda, Senior VP for Oracle Applications, explained the new "Fusion 11g Apps" which are now generally available. Basically, they took all the scattered applications they have from acquisitions of PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, Siebel and so on, and re-wrote them to industry-standard Java so that they would all run either on-premise or in the Cloud. The Enterprise Apps come in seven categories: Financials like General Ledger and Payroll; Human Capital Management (HCM) formerly known as Human Resources; Supply Chain Management (SCM); Customer Relationship Management (CRM); Governance Risk and Compliance (GRC); Procurement; and Project/Portfolio Management (PPM). Oracle also has "Industry Apps" for specific verticals.

All of these apps have "embedded BI" (business intelligence), such as dashboards, multi-dimensional calculations, decision support, and real-time optimization. This is intended to help the end-user answer four questions:

What do you need to do today?

How to get it done?

What you need to know today?

Who can help you?

Larry Ellison, Oracle CEO, said that it took six years to rewrite all the Fusion Apps. They used an "agile" development model with over 200 early adopters to ensure that these applications were successful. They were under a "controlled release program" but now that is over, and the applications are generally available. Larry indicates that these applications were developed under the concepts of Service Oriented Architecture [SOA], which neither Salesforce.com nor SAP R3 have.

(This made me chuckle. SOA was initially developed by IBM and Microsoft, but is now industry standard. There is no reason not to develop software that isn't SOA.)

Following the IBM model, Oracle has built-in the security at the OS, Database and Middleware layer, rather than in each application. As IBM has understood for several decades, a secure infrastructure is the way to go so that all applications are secure.

With all these Fusion Apps now re-written so that they work on industry-standard Java (J2EE, actually), allowing them to run either on-premise or out on the Cloud, Larry Ellison said "I guess we need a Cloud!" This started his announcement of the "Oracle Public Cloud" [OPC]. OPC has both PaaS and SaaS. The PaaS would offer VM instances with support for database and Java services. The SaaS would be all the Fusion Apps rented on the "as-a-service" model. Rather than force everyone to Oracle 11g, you can run any Oracle database on OPC, and you can run any Java or J2EE application on the OPC.

Your data is portable. Larry is pro-choice, and wants people to be able to move from any cloud to any cloud. Since it's based on industry-standard Java, applications can move seamlessly between OPC, Amazon EC2 and IBM SmartCloud. IBM has been a major force behind [Open Cloud Standards], so it is always good that other major vendors follow suit.

He quoted [someone as saying "Beware of False Clouds"] This was Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff's attack against all "Private Cloud" IT vendors. Larry twisted this to say he agrees, "True Clouds" are based on open industry standards, and "False Clouds" are vendor-lockin. OPC is based on Java, J2EE, XML, BPEL and Ruby on Rails, whereas Salesforce.com is based on proprietary Heroku and APEX. He called Salesforce.com the "Roach Motel of Cloud Computing" .. you can check in, but you can't check out.

OPC plans to offer some "data sources", including Dun&Bradstreet news feed, Twitter, Facebook and other social networks. It is based on a monthly subscription using a self-service portal. The resources are elastic, with capacity delivered on demand. He claims that Salesforce.com is rate-limited, and cancels long-running jobs if they are consuming too many resources. Larry said OPC would never do that.

Larry said that there are private-only offerings like SAP R3, and public-only offerings like Salesforce.com, Workday, and Taleo, but Oracle instead has adopted the IBM model of supporting choice between private, public and hybrid clouds.

Larry then attacked "Multi-tenancy", specifically, the idea that SaaS providers often use a single database instance, but then create a column to identify which records belong to which tenants. He said this was state-of-the-art 15 years ago, but is a bad idea now. Too risky. Instead, Larry's OPC has unique database instances for each tenant through virtualization.

Larry also announced the Oracle Social Network (OSN). This is a corporate-version of Facebook, that supports collaboration and file-sharing, similar to IBM [LotusLive], Google Docs, or Microsoft Office365. All of the Fusion Apps are written to interface directly with the OSN or any of these other social networks through APIs. This includes navigation and integrated social networking. He also indicated that all Fusion Apps run on mobile devices. He showed the SAP R3 GUI, and said it reminded him of "the fins on a 1968 Cadillac!"

He then gave an example of a mythical sales manager Bob, and his sales employee Julian, selling two Exadata boxes for $4.8 Million USD. A "safe harbor" statement was shown at the beginning of this keynote, to make sure nobody asks to buy Exadata boxes this cheap.

IBM had over a dozen storage-related announcements this week. This is my third and final part in my series to provide a quick overview of the announcements.

IBM Tivoli® Storage Manager v6.3

IBM Tivoli Storage Manager is market-leading software that provides not just backup, but also HSM and archive capabilities across a wide variety of operating systems. Originally developed in the IBM Almaden Research Center, it then moved about 15 years ago to Tucson to become a commercial product.

The new TSM v6.3 introduces site-to-site hot-standby disaster recovery feature that replicates the TSM meta data and data for fast recovery. The maximum number of objects supported has doubled to four billion. Reporting has been enhanced using technologies borrowed from IBM Cognos. Lastly, a feature on Tivoli Storage Productivity Center has been carried forward to deploy and update agents on the various clients.

IBM Tivoli Storage FlashCopy Manager coordinates application-aware backups through the use of point-in-time copy services such as FlashCopy or Snapshot on various IBM and non-IBM disk systems. The versions can remain on disk, or optionally processed by Tivoli Storage Manager to move them to external storage such as tape for added protection.

There will always be a spot in my heart for this product, as the method to use FlashCopy for application-aware backups on the mainframe was my 19th patent, and subsequently delivered as a series of enhancements to DFSMS over the past decade on the z/OS operating system. It is good to see this innovation has "jumped over" to distributed systems.

The new FlashCopy Manager v3.1 adds support for HP-UX and VMware, expands support for IBM DB2 and Oraqcle databases, and introduces an interface for custom business applications.

TSM for VE is a new addition to the TSM family, focused on being able to coordinate hypervisor-aware data protection. Initially it supports VMware, but IBM has plans to support a variety of other server virtualization hypervisors as well, as over 40 percent of companies run two or more hypervisors in their data center.

The new TSM for VE v6.3 adds a VMware vCenter plug-in, and support for hardware-based disk snapshots.

IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center v4.2.2

A long time ago, I was the chief architect IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center v1, now we are already up to v4.2.2 release!

IBM has added enhanced reporting based on IBM Cognos technology, including storage tiering analysis reports (STAR). Few companies keep all of their storage tiers in a single disk system. Rather, they have different boxes, and often from different vendors. IBM's Productivity Center can report on both IBM and non-IBM disk systems. New this release is support for the internal disks of the Storwize V7000 midrange disk system.

Productivity Center's "SAN Planner" has been enhanced to consider XIV replication criteria. This SAN Planner helps clients decide where to carve LUNs, and to make sure they pick the right place given all of the criteria such as remote copy replications.

Last year, we introduced Productivity Center for Disk Midrange Edition (MRE) which to offer lower price when you are only managing midrange disk systems DS5000, DS3000, Storwize V7000 and SVC managing these. This was so successful, that we now have TPC Select, which is basically Productivity Center Standard Edition (SE) for these midrange disk systems.

Whew! I have already heard from some of my readers to slow down, that this is too much information to deal with all at once. IBM has tried everything from having just a few announcements nearly every Tuesday, to having huge launches every two to three years, and settled in the middle with announcements about four to five times per year.

Next week, October 2-6, I am in San Francisco to support the IBM exhibition boot at [Oracle OpenWorld 2011] conference. IBM is a Grand Level Sponsor for this event. IBM and Oracle have been partners since 1986, and IBM is a [Diamond Level Partner in the Oracle OpenNetwork], the highest level available. I will be joined by dozens of other subject matter experts from various parts of IBM. Here is my schedule:

Day

Time

Description

Sunday

5:30pm - 7:00pm

Keynote session, Moscone North, Hall D

7:15pm - 10:30pm

IBM Team Dinner

Monday

8:00am - 9:15am

Keynote session, Moscone North, Hall D

9:45am - 4:30pm

IBM Booth #1111, Moscone South

5:00pm - 7:00pm

JD Edwards Customer Appreciation Event

Tuesday

8:00am - 9:15am

Keynote session, Moscone North, Hall D

9:45am - 6:00pm

IBM Booth #1111, Moscone South

7:00pm - 9:30pm

Titan Award Gala, SF City Hall

Wednesday

8:00am - 9:15am

Keynote session, Moscone North, Hall D

9:45am - 4:00pm

IBM Booth #1111, Moscone South

I won't have my laptop at the IBM booth, so if you need to reach me, send me an SMS text message to my cell phone, or send me a tweet on my Twitter account: [@az990tony]

IBM will also have experts in the following areas throughout the week:

This week, IBM made over a dozen announcements related to IBM storage products. Here is part 2 of my overview:

IBM System Storage® DS8000 series microcode

One of the advantages of acquiring XIV as IBM's other high-end disk system, is that it allows the DS8000 team to focus on the IBM i and z/OS operating systems. As a result, IBM DS8000 has over half the mainframe-attach market share.

For System z customers, the latest DS8000 microcode has synergy with z/OS and GDPS, now supporting 4x larger EAV volumes, faster high-performance FICON (zHPF), and Workload Manager (WLM) integration with the I/O Priority Manager. IBM has a world record SAP performance of 59 million account postings per hour. DB2 v10 for z/OS queries were measured at 11x faster using the new zHPF feature.

IBM System Storage® DS8800 systems

On the hardware side, the DS8800 now supports a fourth frame to hold a total over 1,500 disk drives. Yes, we have customers that three frames wasn't enough, and they wanted more.

IBM is now also offering new drive options. Small Form Factor (2.5 inch) drives now include 300GB 15K RPM drives, and a 900GB 10K RPM drives. But wait! There's more! The DS8800 is no longer a SFF-only box, it now allows for mixing in Large form factor (3.5 inch) drives, starting with the 3TB NL-SAS 7200 RPM drive.

IBM XIV® Storage System Gen3

We announced the XIV Gen3 already, but we have two enhancements.

First, we now offer a model based entirely on 3TB NL-SAS drives. If you are thinking, what IBM is going to put 3TB drives into everything? Yup. Once we go through all the pain and suffering of qualifying a drive, we make sure we get our money's worth!

Secondly, we have now an iPad application to manage the XIV. This has nothing to do with Apple CEO Steve Jobs passing away last week, it was merely coincidence.

IBM Real-time Compression Appliances™ STN6500 and STN6800 V3.8

The latest software for RtCA now supports Microsoft SMB v2, and enhanced reporting so that storage admins know exactly the benefits of the compression ratios of different file extensions.

Wednesday morning at the [Oracle OpenWorld 2011] conference started with another keynote session. This time, Safra Catz, CFO and President of Oracle, introduced John Chambers, CEO of Cisco.

John says Cisco is helping to "empower the customer through market transitions." This includes helping customers decide how to deploy new technology, choosing between integrated stacks and interoperable components, scaling the business with a flat IT budget, and how/when to decide on moving to the cloud.

(FTC Disclosure: IBM resells Cisco switches and directors and are considered a partner in this sense. If you are going to buy Cisco switches and directors, please consider buying them through IBM.)

The information economy is transitioning to a networked one. Access to information is not as important as access to expertise. Process and Procedures are not as important as Communities and Relationships. The old style Command-and-Control management is giving way to Collaboration. He showed a chart that showed the evolution from routed/bridged networks to packet/mobile and video. He also had a chart that showed the evolution from Mainframe/Mini-computers, to Client/Server and Web, to Virtualization in the Cloud. He also indicated that Google's acquisition of Motorola was indicative of the "Death of the PC".

High Tech companies must re-invent themselves to stay relevant. Here were Cisco's five "Foundational Priorities":

Leadership in the Core. This refers to his core business of high-end Ethernet and Fibre Channel directors.

Collaboration. This was the original promise of networking computers together, was to bring people together also. He feels that "Collaboration" will take off in the 2010's.

Data Center/Virtualization/Cloud. Cisco is now in the business of selling computers. They are now #2 in North America for x86 server sales, and #3 globally. In this regard, they are a direct competitor to both IBM and Oracle at this conference. John wants to create "borderless" networks between Private and Public clouds. He claims that they have now 8,228 Ciscu UCS customers over the past 18 months. This was a slam at Oracle, who hasn't sold half that many new systems in the same time period.

Video. John indicated that every product in the Cisco family is video-enabled, from the Cius tablet, to WebEx, to TelePresence, to all of his switches and directors. In theory, the "Flip" video cam that Cisco dropped in their latest round of layoffs would have also been counted in that category. John indicates that he envisions video will take over as the predominant communication mechanism. Back in 2006, at Oracle OpenWorld, John showed a chart that indicated that people will transition from passive TV-watchers to active video producers. Here we are five years later, and while 24 hours' worth of video are uploaded to YouTube every second, most people are still TV-watchers.

Architectures for Business Transformation. He elaborated on this to refer to issues like reliability, security, and products that are designed to work together. Business and Government leaders are focused on their business, not technology.

He gave a demo of Cisco UCS. This is a 4U collection of server blades, with up to 384GB of DRAM using 8GB DIMMs, or 192GB using much-cheaper 4GB DIMMs. There are 2 switches with 8 ports each 10GbE, for a total of 160 Gbps, that can carry both Ethernet and FCoE traffic. The UCS System Manager is similar to IBM's Unified Resource Manager in that it manages the entire box. A "service profile" has 40 to 50 BIOS settings that can be applied to give each x86 blade a specific personality. You can re-provision these by changing their service profile as needed.

The next demo was really cool. They took video that involved people talking, and had it "machine transcribed" so that you can read the words being said in the video. Type in a word like "tolerances" in the search engine, and the video advances exactly to the spot where that word is uttered.

The next demo after that involved a special camera for monitoring High-Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) lanes in traffic. In an example used in London, UK, the camera can see inside the car and confirm there are enough people to justify HOV usage, and if not, scan the license plate and charge the owner of the vehicle a fine. (In a sense, "Big Data" analytics combined with Cisco's vision of ubiquitous video equals [Big Brother])

In another slam against Oracle, John actually backed up his claims with published benchmarks. He wrapped up his talk with: "If I have done my job well, then you will all leave this room a bit uncomfortable." Not surprisingly, John didn't mention either the vBlock relationship with EMC, or the FlexPod relationship with NetApp.

The Metro Atlanta Chamber (MAC) is focused on bringing businesses and jobs into the Metro Atalanta area, and to help its members connect with other companies that can help them thrive. The MAC cover the Metropolitan region of Atlanta (5.8 million people) and 28 counties in Georgia.

The event was called "Technology Thursday", where the MAC holds a meeting on the third Thursday of every month, to discuss technology issues. The audience was a mix of business owners, sales executives, and managers. The event allowed for people to network with each other, as well as learn something new from a subject matter expert. This was the last one for 2011, to avoid conflicts with upcoming holidays in November and December.

Last year, I presented "The Future of Storage" in seven cities across Australia and New Zealand. Then, back in August, I presented "The Future of IT Storage" as an [InfoBoom Webinar] from Calgary in Canada.

This was a big success, and triggered the idea from our mid-market events team to have me travel across United States and meet with clients face-to-face in an informal setting. This started with a [Lunch-and-Learn at Indianapolis].

Next week, I will be in Atlanta. I will be presenting "The Future of IT Storage" at the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce [Technology Thursday].
Here are the details: